With the much-anticipated Anvil Centre nearly complete, its management team is reaching out to the arts community.
A who’s who of the New West art scene along with several school teachers and artisans gathered at Centennial Lodge on Wednesday night to hear how the new Anvil Centre will fit into the city’s longstanding arts and culture community.
Moderated by Rob McCullough, manager of the New Westminster Museum and Archives, the crowd heard presentations from Anvil Centre manager Vali Marling, museum and archives curator Oana Capota, new media gallery curators and directors Sarah Joyce and Gordon Duggan, and arts coordinator Bilianna Velkova.
“The key thing is, we are the facilitators of what the community wants to do,” McCullough told the audience. “It’s about you.”
For McCullough and his team, this means providing the arts community with spaces to create, exhibit and meet – the top three priorities that came out of similar forums earlier this year.
In order to provide the community with exactly what it wants and needs, the Anvil Centre has been divided into different spaces for conferences, performing arts, visual arts and special events.
Velkova added that it’s management’s goal to ensure that everyone in the arts community has a chance to use the facility for their specific needs.
“We’re excited to hear your thoughts and ideas,” she told the audience on Wednesday.
For Velkova, it’s important the programs and exhibits offered at the Anvil Centre are connected to things happening within the community of New Westminster. For example, staff are preparing an exhibit that celebrates theWait For Me Daddysculpture scheduled for unveiling in October, right across the street from the new centre.
In addition to these types of connected exhibits, the community will also play a role in what art is displayed throughout Anvil Centre.
According to Velkova, the artwork displayed in the community art spaces (located in the hallway outside the theatre) will be chosen by a peer jury. Positions on the jury will be rotated to ensure everyone can have a chance to participate in the selection process.
While the official opening isn’t for another four months, staff at the museum and archives are already preparing for the move from Irving House.
“Our next steps are to get the final exhibits put in place. We have them designed, we have them planned but haven’t constructed them inside,” McCullough said.
Shelves are just some of the fine details that still need to be completed before the exhibits can be put together, he added. Staff is also working on the programming for the fall when the Anvil Centre officially opens.
“So that we have scheduled activities and scheduled events,” he said. “A lot of those things that we heard from the community, slotting them in and finding times to make them happen.”
McCullough said the staff will continue to work with community groups to ensure the centre is meeting the needs laid out during the forums this year – although he already has the support of many groups, especially when they were told the average cost for them to rent a room in the centre would be between $5 and $10.
McCullough said the intention of the centre is to provide a space for artists and artisan groups to connect, and providing affordable space is just one of the ways the management team intends to do this.
But when asked if the idea behind the Anvil Centre was similar to the idea behind the other community facilities in New West, McCullough was adamant – Anvil is not a community centre.
“It’s a cultural centre,” he said. “The difference there being that a lot of the functions that happen in a cultural centre can also happen in a community centre but not everything that happens in a community centre can happen in a cultural centre.”
For the culturally inclined folks, the centre will be the new home for the New Westminster Museum and Archives. Located on the third floor, the museum will feature several different exhibits (some local, others travelling exhibits), a chronological timeline of New West’s history, children’s areas (including tunnels for the extra little ones), and touchable displays.
“When they come with families, they want an immersive experience,” Capota told The Record. “I want to animate the space by getting a lot of … touchable artifacts that enhance what’s on display.”
Capota’s team is already working on several new displays for the opening of the new museum and archives in the fall including the history of the May Queens, complete with photos of nearly all 144 May Queens.
“It’s getting to the point where we’ve run out of wall space,” she said with a laugh.
In addition to the designated museum and archives space, there will several display cases throughout the Anvil Centre as well as rooms for multimedia displays, including an oral history room with windows all around where visitors can sit down and listen to oral stories played on iPads.
“You open a door and suddenly you’re just looking outside and it will be nice to sit down and put on headphones and actually get to listen to an oral history,” she said.
Capota said many people in the community don’t even know the museum has an extensive collection of recorded oral histories from a variety of people related to New Westminster – famous or not.
